Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google, USA“New developments in machine intelligence will make us far far smarter as a result, for everyone on the planet. It’s because our smart phones are basically supercomputers.”

“Around 400 million people in the last year got a smartphone. If you think that’s a big deal, imagine the impact on that person in the developing world.”

“Think about learning and education with all the new tools that are being built. We are on the cusp of the acceleration of that and it’s almost overwhelmingly good.”

“Everyone gets smarter because of this technology… and the empowerment of people is the secret to technological progress.“

“[In the future], the Internet will disappear… you won’t even sense it, it will be part of your presence all the time.”

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer and Member of the Board, Facebook, USA
“If we can extend [the internet] to more people, we increase voice… we increase economic opportunity… and we increase equality.”

“The benefits of getting women connected often outweigh the benefits of getting men connected because they will put their investments back into the education and health care of their children.”

Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft Corporation, USA“I’m most grounded on the role of technology. Ultimately to me it’s about the human capital and the human potential and technology empowers humans to do great things. You have to be optimistic about what technology can do in the hands of humans.”

“We’ve got to get this balance between privacy and at the same time use of data for legitimate public safety. The internet is one of the greatest global goods, and common goods. If we destroy it, we destroy a lot of our economic future.”

Marc R. Benioff, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Salesforce, USA“Trust is a serious problem, we have to get to a new level of transparency – only through radical transparency will we get to radical new levels of trust.”

Marissa Mayer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Yahoo!“A reaction to Snowden was that you saw a lot of people became more concerned about their privacy and it became a lot more about encryption.”

“I hope that if we come back here next year we’ll be talking about things very much more positively. So rather than just worrying about the niggling fears that people are going to be spying on us and doing the wrong things with our data, instead I hope we will have woken up to the completely exciting possibilities when it comes to our data.”

“I hope that we’ll be in a situation where I can store data wherever I like, but it’s stored there in a way it’s treated as mine.”

Vittorio Colao, Chief Executive Officer, Vodafone Group, United Kingdom
“My vision for the future state of the digital economy – I see a movie. I see a story of everybody connected with very low latency, very high speed, ultra-dense connectivity available. Today you’re at the start of something amazing… I see the freeing up, not just of productivity and money, but also positive energy which can bring a more equal world.”

“To me the biggest question for the future is will we really continue in the future to licence spectrum – do governments licence oxygen? No. The Internet is oxygen, it’s water.”

Image: Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer and Member of the Board, Facebook, USA walks onto the podium at the beginning of the session ‘The Future of the Digital Economy’ in the congress centre at the Annual Meeting 2015 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 22, 2015. WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM/swiss-image.ch/Photo Valeriano DiDomenico